Prompting as Engineering

The cheapest, most reversible adaptation lever: instructions, examples, and structure — treated like code, not incantations.

Content last verified 2026-09.

Lessons

1. The Levers: Instructions, Examples, Structure
2. Few-Shot Mechanics
3. Chain of Thought — and Its Limits
4. Prompts Are Code

Sources

• Brown et al. (2020) — Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (GPT-3, in-context learning)
• Wei et al. (2022) — Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models